In the following essay, de Zwaan comments on the elements of cyberpunk science fiction and postmodern experimentation in Neuromancer, noting the influence of Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Jean Baudrillard on the novel.

The best known cyberpunk manifesto … cannily describes the cyberpunk school's aspirations not in terms of conceits, but as the reflection of a new cultural synthesis being born in the 1980s, making it essentially a paradoxical form of realism.

(Csicsery-Ronay 182)

Sf is a genre seeking to bury the generic, attempting to transcend itself so as to destroy itself as the degraded “low.”

(Luckhurst, “Polemic” 44)

The guiding premise of Larry McCaffery's Storming the Reality Studio, still the definitive work to date on cyberpunk, is spelled out in McCaffery's introduction: